SEO Predictions for 2011

Alot happened in 2010 in the world of SEO, and there’s already been quite a few changes in 2011, so what can we expect for the remainder? Here’s our little breakdown based on what’s happened so far, our gut feeling, patterns we’ve found from testing and information gathered from all the great SEO’s out there who run some pretty awesome blogs.

What to expect?

• Increased efforts from search engines to reduce spam across the web, especially looking at content farms and aggregators and ways to prevent them clogging up the results in order to give users a better browsing experience.
• Citations, reviews and user generated content are likely to be treated far more importantly.
• Increased interaction with search engine results, enabling users to make better and more informed decisions before actually clicking onto a website – Google instant previews was one indication of this last year, now the experimental Google Plus 1 is just further reinforcing the rise of social search. You can find more info about google plus 1 on Tom Critchlows guest post on SEOmoz.
• Search results will continue to be ever more personalised, due to the sheer amount of information google can collect about you, combined with them increasingly intergrating more with the social aspect of search.
• Google will continue giving brands added importance in their search results
• The use and advancement of rich snippets will continue to grow so that search results become increasingly useful for end users
• Conversion rate optimisation will become increasingly important as business owners want to maximise revenue from the traffic earned via their Search engine optimisation efforts.
• Video results integration in the search engines will increase, sites that utilise video to engage users will reap the benefit of this and become more authoritative.

To anyone reading, this isn’t a list of every change that will happen in 2011, it’s a set of predictions, so don’t treat it as a full on strategy, but definitely think about using them within your current SEO efforts.